Amazon.com Goes Down, Loses $66,240 Per Minute

It's been a bad week for ecommerce. On Friday,
Google temporarily went dark, causing a 40% drop in web traffic. Today
Amazon.com went down for approximately 30 minutes, preventing shoppers from accessing the site via Amazon.com, mobile and Amazon.ca.

During the outage, users were hit with an error message: " Oops! We're very sorry, but we're having trouble doing what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance--click the Back button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning on our homepage."

AWS was also temporarily affected by this outage, though it's now resolved. According to the Service Health Dashboard, "Between 11:45am PDT and 12:32pm PDT we experienced increased latency creating, deleting and updating Elastic Beanstalk environments in the US-EAST-1 region. Existing Elastic Beanstalk environments were unaffected." Though AWS powers much of the internet, it doesn't appear any other sites were impacted by this issue.

I've reached out to Amazon for comment on Amazon's downtime. The last time Amazon experienced an outage like this was in June 2008, which cost the ecommerce platform nearly $31,000 per minute based on its previous quarter's revenue of quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally. Today, this outage theoretically cost Amazon $66,240 per minute - or nearly $2 million - based on Amazon's 2012 net sales.